TT:E C16

The night was dark, obviously, but it was so much darker than Maeve was used to and it felt oppressive in a way she hadn’t ever experienced before. She’d never experienced a night where there was no source of light besides the moon and the stars. Streetlights, cars passing by, the general illumination that came from a city or town at night, all of that served to light up the darkness when the sun was away. Without any of that it was too dark to see anything at all, and Maeve truly understood why people feared the dark so much. There were lighters in the gas station and various things that could be burned for light and heart, but without any knowledge of what might be around them the group decided not to start a fire and potentially draw attention to themselves.

She sat quietly near the door to the gas station’s break room, doing her best to listen for any movement. The System had informed them that it was unlikely for monsters to spawn immediately on top of sapient beings, but it wasn’t impossible, and nothing prevented them from spawning near by and making their way closer, meaning a watch was necessary. Without a reliable way to tell time they had to guess at how long each person needed to stay up, and Maeve wasn't entirely sure if she’d gotten a fair deal when Ed had woken her up for her shift. She didn’t think he’d stiffed her on sleeping time, it was actually the opposite, she wasn’t sure if he’d let her sleep longer than he should have. Either way there was nothing to do about it now, so she just kept listening.

Ed had ended up with the same class as Alex, Armored Warrior, although from the skills he’d picked he was aiming for more of a damage build than a tank build. He’d taken skills that let him get in close and hit hard without taking too much damage himself. By video game logic they had a pretty good party composition. It wasn’t perfect, since they didn’t have any way to deal damage from a distance yet, but they had a good set up. A tank, an off-tank that could do damage, a fast melee damage dealer, a healer, and a support that could buff allies and debuff enemies was a good spread that gave them a lot of variability when it came to fights.

Maeve knew she was lucky, starting this new world, this new life, with some of her best friends next to her, each of them reliable allies in their own way, but that only deepened her worries for people that weren’t that lucky. Specifically, her two brothers, the only family she had left. Amelia and Alex were part of her found family, but that didn’t in any way detract from her love for her brothers, or the almost all-encompassing worry that hit her if she let herself dwell on it. Malachi was at college and surrounded by strangers with their own goals and motivations, assuming that he hadn’t been teleported off somewhere when integration had hit like Miss Stations. The end of life as everyone knew it was going to bring out the worst in some people and the best in others, and she had no way of knowing if her little brother was with people that wouldn’t mistreat him, or worse. He had been only an hour’s drive away, but now she had no idea where he actually was.

Caleb, her older brother, might be in an even worse spot depending on how you looked at it. He’d started a cross-country road trip in his new RV after quitting his terrible job, and he’d been alone in the middle of the country last she’d heard from him. Alone might be worse than surrounded by people you didn’t know, because strangers at least had the chance of being good people, you might have a support network. If you were alone you didn’t even have that possibility, every situation was exacerbated by not having anyone to help you. Every threat, every injury, every difficulty you had to deal with on your own. Assuming that he wasn’t moved to somewhere with people around, but assuming either of her brothers were somewhere completely different than where they’d started didn’t change the fundamentals. She didn’t know where they were, she couldn’t help them, and she didn’t know how to find them.

Maeve knew her friends had the same or similar worries, but she couldn’t help with that either. All of her energy had to be spent on keeping them all alive. As much as she hated it in that moment, the hierarchy of needs was a real thing and staying alive to do anything else was the very base of that pyramid. Of course, that all funneled upward into the next level and so on until she was able to figure out where her family was and how to get to them, meaning she was doing the best she could in the moment to help her brothers, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like she was sitting around being useless.

Eventually a few hours passed, and Maeve gave it enough estimated time to make sure she wasn’t cheating anyone out of sleep before waking up Alex. His back was to the wall, with Amelia curled in his arms as Maeve gently shook him awake. He pulled himself free form his girlfriend and Maeve slipped into the place he’d vacated, taking her best friend in her arms. Closing her eyes, she did her best to drift back off to sleep as she drove the feelings of guilt and worry away with her sheer exhaustion. The energy boost from getting their class had been great, but it had been like a sugar rush on top of not sleeping, the crash was a hard one.

She groggily pulled herself awake as someone shook her. Faint sunlight drifted in through the door, indicating that she’d slept till morning. She pushed off the ground and sat up, rubbing at her eyes and yawning as Scarlet pulled back from her.

“Oh good, you didn’t take long. Here,” She slipped a can and a plastic bag into Maeve’s hands. “Some foreign chips and a lukewarm soda, breakfast of champions.”

“That’s all we got?” Maeve asked as she pulled open the chips. “I thought I saw some other food last night.”

“This seems to be more of a small convenience store with limited selection than one of the big ones from home. No evidence of anything cooked, not that I’d trust it at this point, and the food options are almost entirely snacks. There are some little cakes and candy bars you can have, but chips seem to be the closest to actual food.”

Maeve grunted and chugged a good portion of her soda. “It’s all junk. Chips, snack cakes, or whatever. We’re lucky to have it but we’re going to need real food soon enough.”

“Yeah well…” Scarlet trailed off with a shrug. “Gotta deal with what we have and all that, right?”

“Right, but it needs to be a factor in our planning.”

“I gotcha. Go ahead and get fueled up for the day, the guys are getting their armor on. Once we’re all ready we can have a planning session and see what to do next.”

Maeve munched through the chips and some jerky that Amelia scrounged up while they waited on Alex and Ed. That immediately went to the top of Maeve’s “what to bring with us” list after water. It was overprocessed, salt covered junk, but it was the only thing they’d found with any protein in it so they needed it.

After the two men had put on their armor, a slightly shorter process since Alex’s wound had been healed more by Amelia’s new magic, they clustered together in the back room again, to hash out what to do next. Maeve shoved some jerky at Alex and Ed and made sure they started eating it before she started talking.

“We’re still in a shitty position, but we’re doing better than we were yesterday. Even if it isn’t the healthiest, finding this place gave us a lot ore food than we had and extends the timeline we have to get to somewhere safe. I still think our best bet is heading to the safe zone the System described but this hasn’t suddenly become a dictatorship. Does anybody have an idea they think is better?”

“I don’t know for sure that it’s better, but I do have an idea,” Scarlet said. “Finding all these supplies gives us more time we can survive without needing help or finding some way to feed ourselves, like you said, and the building itself could be a base for us. I’ve been thinking about this quest we all have. I don’t know a ton about video games, I only played a few here and there, but I get the idea of more risk equaling more reward. I don’t think we’ll get as good a reward, whatever that happens to be, if we run away instead of fighting.”

“You think that getting to the safe zone and completing the quest that way counts as running away?” Ed asked around a piece of his jerky.

“Not in a “You’re a coward running away!” type of way, but kind of? Running for safety might be the smartest move for all we know, but its the option that doesn’t guarantee combat. The other way we have to fight in order to level, which means its automatically more risky.” Scarlet shrugged, “I don’t know if its for sure what we want to do, but I thought I’d bring it up. From what I’ve been hearing y’all say we need to be prepared for a world that runs on conflict now, and this is a way that helps us get ready and might get us rewards that could help out long term.”

“Or the entire point is getting to a safe zone and it’ll just give us short term benefits that help with that,” Alex pointed out, “The messages said that the System’s goal is to keep as many people alive as possible. Giving people extra rewards for making themselves stronger in isolated ways doesn’t match that.”

“We’re running into the same wall we have been, which is that we don’t know enough to even make guesses.” Maeve looked around at her friends. “Does anybody have a problem with trying to fight if we find a monster or something? Setting aside whether or not we’ll get better rewards for doing the more dangerous options, more levels is inherently better than less levels at this point.”

No one voiced an issue and Maeve nodded. “Alright then. If we find or run into a monster that we think we can take safely, we try it. But we’re doing it while moving toward the safe zone. Worst case we’ll have the option to really run for safety if we get in over our heads and best case we can just hang outside the perimeter until we hit the required level for the quest to finish.”

They rearranged and organized what they were carrying as they packed up and got ready to move. The “best” of the food they had got priority over the stuff they liked less as they moved things around in the bags they’d brought from Ed’s truck. They were in the middle of a discussion about whether it was worth it to use some of their limited carry capacity on bringing some alcohol and tobacco from the gas station to use as trade goods when there was a loud bang from above them.

They all froze in place as something on the roof hissed loud enough for them all to hear it and smashed at something, making more bangs ring out. They all reached for their weapons.

“I think that’s part of the ventilation system it’s hitting,” Ed whispered.

“Can it get in?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen how big it is.”

The noises stopped after a few seconds. Everyone waited as quietly as possible for something else to happen. Alex’s head turned and Maeve looked to see what he’d seen. A large green hand that looked oddly geometric slowly laced itself on the front window of the building and an equally odd limb pulled the rest of the body down. A head that looked like an ancient tribal mask peeked into view, upside down since it was crawling down from the roof. Two empty pits where eyes should have been turned to stare into the building, catching on Alex, who was closest.

That same hissing noise from a moment ago came out of the thing’s circular mouth as it stared at all of them. Then, with movements faster than it had shwon it was capable of, it pulled back a hand and slammed it onto the glass, shattering it, before it threw its body through the opening at them.